How to Quickly Prepare for Software Engineering Interviews

A few months ago, I found myself needing to prepare for a series of job interviews within a very...

A few months ago, I found myself needing to prepare for a series of job interviews within a very limited timeframe. It was a stressful experience, but it ultimately worked out well. I decided to share my notes and reflections in case they’re helpful to others in a similar situation.

This is especially relevant if you’re not actively job hunting and suddenly receive an interview invitation, leaving you with limited time to prepare but a strong desire to maximize your chances of success.

Disclaimer: The tips described in this post may be more useful for senior engineers with hands-on experience and engineering intuition.

HR Interview

The internet is full of articles listing all possible HR interview questions. I recommend spending a bit of time on them just to understand what to expect and not be surprised.

However, in my humble opinion, there are two main points to focus on during HR interview preparation.

First, you need a short story that tells your experience briefly. Avoid listing every bullet point from your CV. Instead, focus on highlighting your key achievements. Also, your story must be aligned with the position you are applying to. Yes, you might need to adjust your story for different jobs at different companies.

Second, it’s important to have a clear motivation. Why do you want to change your job, and why this company/role? What kind of job are you looking for?

System Design

If you have some experience doing System Design interviews or have never done it, start by learning the Delivery framework. Understand each section.

Watch at least one video on how it’s done. The more, the better. These videos from Hello Interview channel are really good, though.

If you are applying to a FAANG company, you may search for leaked system design questions from that company and spend some time preparing for them. But there is no guarantee that you will get the same topic, thus I would not recommend spending all your time here.

If you can, do a mock interview. Ask a friend or find someone to practice with. If you can’t, then try to walk through alone, but talk through everything out loud.

During the interview, treat the interviewer as a colleague, ask questions, ensure you understand the problem, and that you have not missed any important requirements before building the design of the system.

Don’t rush.

Live coding

This part is really tricky. If the company tends to use LeetCode-style interviews, there is no shortcut here. You need to solve hundreds of them to really feel confident. You may need to refresh your memory on algorithms you feel less confident about (for example, I always forget about corner cases for binary search).

Again, if it’s a big / well-known company, you can try to search for leaked coding interview questions.

Behavioral interview

S.T.A.R (situation task action result) & C.A.R.L (context action result learning)

There are dozens of questions you could be asked in behavioral interviews. And you’re expected to structure your answers using the STAR framework. This means you need to tell a story by defining a context, your actions, and results. You could go and just prepare a STAR format answer to all such questions, but it will take a lot of time, and it’s suboptimal. This, combined with the fact that the same stories can be used for different questions, makes the situation easier for you. You can prepare 7–10 stories that will cover most of the questions. During preparation, you can write them as text, but don’t read them during the interview. It tends to sound unnatural.

When telling your story using the STAR method, make sure your final sentence clearly highlights a positive outcome. Adjust your tone to emphasize this closing part so it stands out.

The STAR framework is a standard. But also check CARL in some questions, it would be good to tell what you have learned from that story.

Here are some materials that helped me to prepare for a behavioral interview:

• Hello Interview - Behavioral Interview Discussion with Ex-Meta Hiring Committee Member- must watch Behavioral interview, although I would recommend watching it even before the HR interview, because it gives a bunch of helpful tips about self-presentation
• https://thebehavioral.substack.com/ - Strategies, tips, and resources to prepare for your next behavioral interview from a FAANG+ insider.

Project Walkthrough

Some companies have such an interview stage. It’s quite unpopular but still exists. You’re asked to present a project or problem you worked on. You explain the context, problem, solution, results, and your role in this story. It’s like showing the result of your work to colleagues from different departments/teams.

This stage is very open-ended. You are not given specific instructions, and there is not much information on the internet with recommendations on how to prepare and conduct such interviews. When I found out I would have this interview, I was initially shocked and unsure how to prepare, as I didn’t know what to expect. It wasn't until I realized that in reality, it’s you, the interviewee, who rules this interview. You choose the project, decide what to include and omit, control the level of detail, and you are coming up with the story you know, with all the answers for all possible questions, because it’s your story.

So, make the most of this stage. Prepare your story, make a few slides / notes / architecture sketches.

Don’t dig into details too much. Leave a space for the questions.

And even if there is no dedicated interview, you may be asked to tell in detail about a certain problem/project you were working on. So, be prepared. Have your story!

Final thoughts

When answering open-ended questions, aim to tell stories where the scale of the problem matches the level of the role you’re applying for. For example, if you are asked, “Tell me about a challenging/interesting problem/task you were working on recently.” Optimizing an SQL query by adding an index may be fine for junior roles, but it won’t carry enough weight for senior positions. Interviewers would expect to hear something bigger, challenging, higher stakes, and often involving cross-team collaboration, such as migrating a large system to Kubernetes.

Question back. You should ask questions to learn more about the company, their culture, the hiring manager’s management style, and what they like or dislike about their work. Prepare a list of questions before the interview.

Start preparing in advance. Even if you’re not planning to change jobs anytime soon, you can begin investing in your future by:

• solving one LeetCode problem a day
• keeping track of tasks/projects you’ve completed, along with your achievements (many companies require this anyway for performance reviews) – this would be a foundation for your stories in behavioral and project walkthrough interviews.
• keeping your CV and LinkedIn up to date.